for those students as well as opportunities for internships, working with companies, seeing what it's like to be in the work force so they can develop those critical thinking skills and having experiences at either other campuses or outside the country in terms of study abroad. >> the "boston globe" recently reported with this headline that business leaders down beat on workers' prospect, despite an improving economy and record corporate profits, business leaders skeptical about their ability to compete abroad and down right pessimistic about the prospects of increasing pay or improving living conditions for american workers. and in this report they cite issues of higher education. what are some challenges you see in higher education that impact our economy? >> i think there are several challenges, as you've alluded

to. one is there's a changing social compact between companies and the work force and companies are increasingly looking for individuals who have some important technical skill which is why stem education is so important. we were fortunate to see an 8.6% increase in our enrollment of students in engineering programs and i think students are realizing that skrg these skills is important because it's what employers are looking for. >> we're talking with james linder, the interim president of the university of nebraska lincoln, part of c-span bus's big 10 college tour. we kicked that off this weekend. we will continue next week, a month-long series here on "washington journal" talking to university presidents about higher education issues. we want to get your thoughts as well so we've divided the lines by students, parents, educators and nebraska residents.

there they are on your screen. parents 202-585-3881, educate orts 2 02-585-3882. nebraska residents we'll hear from you, 202-585-3883. also send us an e-mail if you would like. dr. lynder is here to talk about his university and issues of higher education. we isle begin with michael in new jersey. michael, are you a former student at the university of nebraska? >> unfortunately, i wasn't. i'm with the students from new jersey. if i makes i just wanted to comment on the kind of culture around rearer career resources. a lot of students in my experience in the past felt as if their career services office didn't help them that much.

couple that with the fact that it may not be aware of the resources, negotiation the fact that a lot of students really lack a lot of confidence in knowing themselves and how they believe belong in the work force. so a lot of it these do with career resoursces juggling part time jobs after college and searching for jobs and careers is a part-time job. so with that said it's about management of time and management of understanding themselves and having confidence in themselves afterwards. >> i agree with you. it's a process as one goes from being an entering student to graduating and it can be very enlightning for students to either individually or as a group walk into a workplace and feel the excitement of a team say they're trying to bring a new product to market and open

their eyes we're try provide that experience to our students. >> dr. lynder, we want our viewers to call in and we've divided the lines by students, parents, educators, nebraska residents. nebraska residents. talk about your outreach to the state of nebraska and how much suppo support, resources, the university of nebraska gets from the state. >> so the university of nebraska has always felt that we have a strong mission to educate the next generation of nebraska. our state is geographically very long, 500 miles so we often talk about a 500 mile campus. we have resources in every county in the state through our extension services, through telehealth, through teleeducation and a variety of programs that try and bring the university to every community.

we're very proud of that. we're humbled by the opportunity to shape our future in this state. >> you have an annual budget at the university of nebraska lincoln of $1.2 billion. endowment of $1.3 billion and alumni contributing a little over $188,000. can you talk about those numbers and what is the cost? how is the money spent? >> the budget. >> the budget of the university of nebraska lincoln is, as you say, $1.2 billion. of that money is it different principally on instruction. there's also a strong outreach program in our service activities through the state to extension and, of course, the research budget is substantial, approaching $300 million in itself. we've been very fortunate in the state of nebraska to enjoy solid

support from our state legislature which has helped us keep tuition rates low. we've also had a very successful campaign through university of nebraska foundation to raise funds for student scholarships, the campaign that just ended created more than a thousand different scholarship funds as well as building the infrastructure that supports the university. so really you see a broad gamut of people in the state of nebraska working together to support higher education. >> next, castle wood, a parent, go ahead, aggie. >> yes, i'm a parent and a student, too. i went back to school after i got laid off from work and got a degree, an associate's degree in engineering and half my classes were classes that i really didn't need far degree, like history, music, pe.

i want to go back and get an education in engineering technology, the first two classes i want to take are u.s. history one and two. you don't need do that for the job and i think we want well-rounded students but when we go to college we want well-trained students in that profession. and i think it would drive the college costs down if they would get these classes that you don't need out of these degree programs and the colleges don't want to admit that but that's -- that was half the cost of my associates degree was classes that i didn't need for the degree. and you could get these degrees in half the time. >> dr. linder? >> the caller makes several good points. first of all, if you can get a lot of support in high school you can shorten your college

experience. here in nebraska we offer what's called the university of nebraska high school and this provides university level courses to students throughout the state that are duel credit so they're satisfying their college requirements while they are in high school. the other important point is the issue of transferability once you've had certain courses. you should have systems that allow those courses to transfer into your next degree we have such programs between the different colleges in our state and the university and we have a unique program where we are piloting reverse transfer of credit back to community colleges so someone who did not complete their associate's degree can use some of their university course nrc purpose. the more dialogue there is, the more efficient it is and the

more cost is reduced as you point out. >> dr. linder, you said earlier $300 million for research at the university of nebraska lincoln. what is the university researching? what's the different air zblas what's its main focus? >> well, obviously there are a variety of areas but being that we here in an ago churultural state, some of the focuses are on how to properly use water resources and how you grow food with less water. we face a population crisis in this world where we have more and more mouths that need to be fed and they need to be fed to ensure political stability in the world. so we have a strong initiative with the doherty water for food program. we have nebraska innovation campus that's focused on food, fuel and water. and this is just a handful of some of the programs that our fact you will tri working on key

ones given our agricultural roots. >> medically at the university of nebraska, lincoln, you're a professor of pathology and microbiology there. this is a headline in the "washington post" this morning "u.s. looks personnel trained to fight ebola. shortage will lamper the military's efforts again the disease." also the third medical mission anywhere to become infected with the ebola virus was wheeled on a borny into the nebraska medical center in omaha for treatment. why the nebraska university hospital? >> just so -- for clarity here, we have four campuses and the university of nebraska medical center is based in omaha not at the university of nebraska lincoln. we have in recent years worked hard at the medical center in

omaha to address some of the threats posed by infectious agents and so many years ago during the sars outbreak we developed a comprehensive biocontainment unit to provide care for patients that might be infected by infectious agents and the u.s. state department recognized that capacity. that has been an important learning experience. to provide education programs for health care providers throughout the country so they can deal with this type of infection it's a critical issue right now.

roger green on twitter wants to know how do you feel about college athletes forming a union and being compensated for generating millions for the universities? >> well, the university of nebraska lincoln has had very successful athletic programs. about 23 different sports and over 620 athletes. the athletic department is entire entirely generates a lot. the question about student organizations and how money is spent in athletics is certainly in the headlines. we try and focus on student athletes first being students as students we'd like to see they are fairly compensated with full scholarships and support of their expenses. and we think that some of the dialogue that is happening now to better support those students

is very important. but in terms of compensating students as if they were employees and unionization, that carries many downsides for the student experience. >> dr. linder, jodi on twitter quotes "a strong mission to educate." is that why the football coach makes more than the top three teachers at every big university in the united states? >> well, i think that compensation of football coaches is very high. and each university exists in a marketplace, unfortunately. having a cap on football coaches' salaries would be an interesting national discussion but it's not one that i want to participate in. >> why not? you sound reluctant. explain that. >> i think that the question about capping any profession

salary, whether it's a coach, an entertainer, a ceo is a more complex discussion than we can take on this morning. but we do live in a marketplace. if you're trying to attract top-tier coaches at any school, you're competing for the employment of those coaches with other schools so i think that's what's driven these salaries to the level where they are. >> professor linder at the university of nebraska, lincoln, what is the state of tenured professors? how many do you have? how does the process work? >> at the university of nebraska lincoln the so-called tenure density the around 60% and the process at the university of nebraska lincoln is that a faculty may enter a tenure track after several years of service, develop a portfolio that would

be assessed to determine whether that faculty would be tenured or not. there are different systems used throughout the country. at our medical examiner in omaha, all faculty enter on what's called a health professions track and sometime during their career, it could be three years, it could be ten years, they may opt for a consideration for tenure. but it isn't the classic up or out situation you see in some tenure programs. >> back to calls, we'll go to texas. william is watching us there. go ahead, william. >> yes, i would like to ask mr. linder how the philosophy of the count crease that was accomplished in the early hundred years ago has changed. it was originally organized to support the agricultural area or the agrarian society. how has that changed and is the

change in the right direction? >> well, the university of nebraska was established in 1869 as a land grant institution and i think by all measures we still function as a land grant institution to provide substantial support for the agriculture efforts in nebraska. we have the institute for ag and natural resources that has many faculty that are working to develop better agricultural techniques throughout the state and the world. this is part of the food, fuel and water initiative that i mentioned earlier. the scope of a land grant institution has certainly increased. so in 1902, the medical center joined the system. so the activities have grown as society needs have increased but

we still focus on agriculture as one of the core missions at the university of nebraska lincoln and actually our agricultural programs showed the second-hi second-highest increase in enrollment this year. >> we're talking with dr. james linder, the interim president at the university of nebraska lincoln part of c-span bus's big 10 college tour. we kick that off this week, month-long series of interviews here on the washington journal with university presidents. on friday the bus will be at the university of iowa and we will talk with the president there, sallie mae son, on friday. this morning dr. james linder aboard the c-span bus in lincoln, nebraska. dmarls south sioux city, nebraska. a parent there. charles, go ahead with your question or comment. >> good morning. i have a question -- i have two grandsons going to your university in the ag department and i was wondering why is so difficult to find scholarship or

any kind of money to go to school? if you don't do the right research, you end up getting none. >> well, at the university of nebraska lincoln, there are a wide variety of need-based scholarships and, in fact at unl 3,000 students attend the university with no tuition charge. there are also other academic-related scholarships depending on what field the student is in. very few student scholarships are actually focused on the potential research that a student might be interested in doing. graduate student and we have extensive support for graduate students who are pursuing master's degrees or phd degrees. >> dr. linder, twitter wants to know "schools get more must be

for out-of-state students. do these students get preferences?" >> in my experience, out-of-state students do not get preferences. e enjoy bringing students to nebraska to both diversify our student body and to hopefully create a student who will stay as an employee of a nebraska-based company. we would appreciate if those costs to bring students in could be lower but that wouldn't be fair to the citizens of nebraska who are paying taxes to support the inin-state students. but we try and look at students inside new england to diversify or student body. this current year is probably the most diverse student body we have relative to ethnic minorities. >> how many slots are there for foreign students?

>>. >> in terms of slots we don't think that way. we evaluate students based on their academic activities and each campus at the university has a different number of foreign students. there are several thousand that are studying here we have exchange programs with brazil, china, eastern europe. interacting with students from brazil, teaching them about our culture and learning about the culture from another country. >> do they pay the full price of college tuition? >>. >> yes, they do. they pay a non-resident rate.

>> bill in florida, you're up next, good morning to you. >> good morning, greta. i'd like to know if you have any affiliation with monsanto and what they're doing with the food, with their new techniques and all that and how -- [ inaudible question ] >> so the university of nebraska lincoln has had research relationship with a variety of companies that are seeking to improve both crop yields and to develop crops that are resistant to pests. that includes the monsanto corporation. >> on twitter here is a tweet from one of our viewers asking "president linder, with respect, college sports have become big, no, huge, business. why should bit treated as -- why should it not be treated as such? >> i think that the question is

the use of revenue that comes from college sports if i understand it correctly at the university of nebraska and that's largely to support the athletic programs. but there's also some strong benefits to the academic mission of if university for example, on our east stadium of the football stadium we have two important research activities. one of them s the nebraska athletic performance library which looks at motions athletes might have and tries to optimize their performance. but it also ties into research studies done on gate disturbances, people with neurologic problems have and -- gait disturbances as well. the center for brain biology and behavior is studying concussions that can occur in sports but is

looking at developmental abnormalities in children. so it's not just a business. it's integrated into the academic experience and for the student athletes -- and i again emphasize students -- they get valuable experiences. i had the pleasure of teaching some of the former university of nebraska football players when they were in medical school and these are individuals who have learned time management, they learn how important it is to get tasks done and they're very moated? >> the columbus "dispatch" reporting in june that big ten presidents and chancellors have proposed four major reforms for athletics guaranteeing four-year scholarship regardless of whether an athlete is able to compete on the playing field, maintain a scholarship for a player even if he leaves college early to pursue a professional career, provide improved consistent medical insurance for players and ensure athletes

scholarships cover the full cost of attendance as define bid the federal government. dr. linder, why do you think these reforms are needed? do you think they're needed? >> i do think these reforms are needed and they reflect the deep commitment student athletes do make to being both a student and an athlete. they address some of the concerns that have lead to the current discussion of how students are treated when they are athletes. so i think they're very fair. they're very fair to the student and help ensure their chances of success in their academic roles in life. the vast majority of student athletes are not going to compete at a professional level so we want to make sure that they have the financial security while they are in school so they can complete their degree program. >> we have a few minutes left here to discuss higher education issues with dr. linder, he's aboard the c-span bus as part of

c-span bus's big 10 college tour. by the way, the "washington times" this morning with this story. "americans are saving more for college." the college savings planet work found the average college savings or pre-paid tuition account known as a 529 plan is now worth $20,671, almost double what these accounts were worth during the dog days of the recession. william in st. paul, minnesota, a parent there. william, go ahead. >> yi, i just want to kind of touch on a question concerning american citizenship versus financial aid. the reason i'm asking, you know, we barely make above $90,000 together but my daughter's first year in college this year she didn't qualify for any pel grants or scholarships or anything. and i'm wondering why is it that

foreign students -- is there an american citizenship qualification on that pell grant or financial aid. ? are you required to be an american citizen? >> william, we'll leave it there. dr. linder? >> i think the question was are you required to be an american citizen to receive a pell grant and that's a question if it came across my desk i would call the director of financial aid and learn what the rules are. i can't give you an accurate answer right now. >> dr. linder, how much support money does the university of nebraska get from the federal government? >> well, you would have to look at the different categories of support that the university of nebraska gets from the federal government. there is a large research enterprise that receives grants from the national institutes of

health and the national science foundation and system wide that approaches over $400 million. those monies come into the university of nebraska and then they're spent on research that benefits both the faculty and the students who are involved in that research then there are financial aid dollars that come into the university counted as part of our budget distributed directly to the students, including the loans and pell grants so that's part of that aggregate budget of $1.2 billion that you mentioned earlier. it's really money flowing through the university system. >> jim, midland, texas, a parent. good morning to you, jim. >> good morning. i have a question for dr. linder. i've been to nebraska, i really love the state. i've been to omaha and worked in lincoln. omaha is a beautiful city, but i felt like dr. linder had dodged

a question earlier and i'd like to hear more about why if you're getting an engineering degree you have to have history which adds a lot of cost to your tuition. thanks. >> so the question comes if you're pursuing, say, an engineering degree should you learn anything other than engineering. should you take a history course? should you taken a english course? and i think education in the humanities, including history, are essential for all citizens to have. there was an extended political discussion that occurred before i came on the air and if our citizens don't an understanding of world history how can they properly vote in elections and understand the issues that face their communities? i think it has to be balanced between your degree program and things that round you out as a human being but i do think those programs are essential.

they shouldn't be duplicate which had i think was one of the concerns in the other caller in that she had already had exposure to history and was asked to take it again at a different university which is why the transfer credits is important. >> dr. linder, another issue for universities is campus safety. vice president joe biden did an interview with next yesterday talking about domestic violence, the ray rice video. and he had this to say. "the next schaj to making sure, ironically, we get college presidents and colleges to understand that they have a responsibility for the safety of women on their campus. they have the responsibility to do what we know from great experience works, bringing the experts, provide people, give the young woman the support she needs, psychological support, medical support and, if need by, the legal support. societal change is taking place, it takes time but i believe it's taking root and we have an obligation to just keep pushing it. dr. linder, do you agree?

and what is the university of nebraska doing on this issue of college safety? >> well, i agree with vice president biden and clearly this is an issue is front page on the news right now. we've always had the good fortune of having a safe environment at the university of nebraska lincoln. as the attention to this issue has grown, we've doubled down on our efforts to make sure that students are aware of their responsibility to treat each other in a respectful manner, to avoid situations such as may occur with bing drinking that could lead to unfortunate behavior. we want to make sure there are counsellors available for our students so this is handled in the proper manner, including law enforcement when necessary. a lot of the bad behavior on campuses has been targeted towards athletes who have been

maybe cut a break. at the university of nebraska if there are any allegations against athletes such as have occurred on other campuses, it's not handled by the athletic department. it's either handled by a separate part of the university or local law enforcement. so we take this seriously. our regent passed new policies in may both for student and employee conduct and we'll do our best to make sure it's a safe campus. the new web site for university of nebraska lincoln that just became live in the last couple weeks has a link on there called "tips" and it provides any student, parent, or citizen the student to report what they believe an unsafe situation that we can address. >> a couple other tweets for you, dr. linder. this one from a viewer who wants to know "across the nation there is a movement to privatize parts of state colleges.

are you on the privatize it bandwagon?" and james says "have the for-profit businesses affected you in any way?" >> these are two tweets that address a very important issue in american education. if you look at the current number, which is a trillion dollars in student loan debt, 13% of those students who have been at for-profit colleges account for a third of that debt and this is driving a lot of the crisis in higher education. so i think that privatization and for-profit activities have to be carefully scrutinized and watched to make sure they are fulfilling the core mission of education, which is to benefit the students not the shareholders of a company. >> mike, rockford, illinois, parent, go ahead, mike.

>> good morning, c-span. my question is to the foreign students that are accepted compared to the state nebraska students that aren't accepted, what do you have to say to those local students that are not accepted. like you mentioned, you have thousands of foreign students and we know with the new laws we have for employment a lot of them are getting first chance at jobs for alesser pay. let's say an engineer $65,000 for a foreign national student. >> okay, mike. dr. linder? >> so any qualified student who is from nebraska is guaranteed acceptance into the university of nebraska. in no situation would a qualified student be denied a seat in one of our classrooms because we had a relationship to bring international students to our program. so we're very aware of our role

to educate first and foremost our citizens. we believe that the international students that come here -- and most do go back to their home country, simply add to the cultural experience that we have on campus. >> dr. linder, if there is one thing you could change about higher education, what would bit? >> oh, wow, that's kind of like the if you get a wish what could bit? i think the awareness of both the students as they pursue entry into college, of the citizens in the united states of what the role is of a college experience and then the interaction between the employers and the students as they come out. so awareness is my answer and it's a broad answer but i firmly

believe that if you achieve understanding of a problem in a situation, you can really get to the optimal situation that you want to be in. and i think there's a lot of misunderstanding, misawareness that currently is surrounding many of the discussions in higher education. >> dr. james lynder is the interim president of the university of nebraska, lincoln. part of c-span buses big ten college tour. >> c-span's campaign 2014 coverage continues tonight with the new hampshire senate debate between senator jeanne shaheen and republican and former massachusetts senator scott brown. the race is listed in some recent polls as a tossup and it's one of the races that could determine control of the u.s. senate. see it tonight, 8:00 p.m. on c-span. at 9:00, the first and only debate for oregon senate between incumbent jeff merkley and republican monica web bi.

poll list this as likely democrat. a large field of congressional candidates face off in louisiana. here's a look at some ads running in the fifth district. life is filled with ups and downs. >> but a man's character is based on how many times he gets back up and stands again. >> i'm lucky to have been blessed with a great family and a wonderful christian wife. >> and i'm blessed to have a husband who owns up to his mistakes, never gives up, always fighting for the good people of louisiana. >> i'm vince mcaller. >> and i'm kelly mcallister. >> and we approve this message because some things are worth fighting for. >> vance mccallister, conservative, veteran, 100% louisiana. >> washington, d.c. is broken and it's only getting worse. too many career politicians, broken promises and embarrassments. that's why we need harris brown, a proven conservative and john creator who knows the value of a

hard day's work and won't rest until the job is done. in congress, harris will protect the promises to the greatest generation and ensure the american dream for those to come. it's time for real leaders, not politicians. >> i'm harris brown, a proud conservative and i approve this message. >> well, washington has let us down and the politicians have let us down. i'm zach dasher and here's my plan. repeal and replace obamacare with a plan that works and its us in charge. two, tap into our energy resources, creating thousands of jobs for folks here in the fifth district. and number three, secure our borders, protecting our national sovereignty. finally, we need to tell the government to respect our christian values and our god-given liberties. this is the most important thing. i'm zach dasher and i approve this message. >> as we sat here this morning in this room, thousands of women and children crossed the border to the united states over the rio grande river. this is going on as we speak

everyday. where is the border security? do we have a border? a country without a border is not a country. you can't do this in switzerland. and you try going through the united states into mexico, you wind up in jail. i'm ed tarply and i approve this message. >> congressman vance mcallister is running for a second term. he won a special election last year. he'll debate republicans harris brown, ed tarply, ralph abraham, zach dasher, collide holloway. the green party's elliot barren and democrat jamie mayo. they'll debate for the state's fifth district seat. we'll have that all tonight on our companion network, c-span. >> now a discussion about the difficulties minorities face getting a college degree. it's part of an event hosted by the ucla civil rights project. this is 40 minutes. >> we start our w our main

message of the paper which is this: college completion is not just a post-secondary issue. the data we use, which is out of a state administrative database in texas, it tracks students from kindergarten all the way through graduate school down to the -- in the work force and between. what we find is that what contributes to the gap in college completion by race actually much of that happens before the student ever enrolls in college two issues frame the texas college success or lack of success in texas. the first is the growing latino demography, the general population but also the k-12 public schools where latinos comprise a majority of all public school students. the problem isn't that there's a growing latino demography, the problem is the growth in latino high school graduates is not translating to enrollment in colleges and universities. with black students it's a slightly different story but no less important. we've seen an increase in

enrollment for the black -- college enrollment for the black population. that is worth praising but this enrollment has not translated into completion. far from it. it's a clear example of how success on one side of the pipeline does not translate to the other side. instead we see that from my analysis in a previous paper that black students are overwhelmingly going to community colleges as a first-choice institution which is likely to decrease their odds of college completion. . there is a racial achievement gap -- a racial achievement gap as well but college completion gap in texas and you see here for student, the six-year completion rate is the different between white and hispanic students is 14.1% and with black and white students 21.9 percentage points between white and black students. so we then sought to examine if

those students who enroll in a four-year college, what is the racial and ethnic composition in key factors that influence college completion? and we present three here, economic disadvantage and present minority in a high school. black and latino students more likely to be economically disadvantaged but hispanics represent the group with the highest economic disadvantage we use trig nominate tri which is a signal for college completion. it's not as large a difference between white and hispanics but look at the difference between black and white students. 23 percentage points. we know racial concentration, racially segregated environments are likely to increase to student achievement than integrated environments. here there are only 32% black and latino students while the rate is dramatically higher for

hispanic and black students at least double this rate with hispanics comprising the group attending the most racially concentrated schools. we ask directly, what contributes to the college completion gap by race and ethnicity, what we call the racial completion gap by pre-college characteristics and post-secondary factors. we use literature to guide these analysis. in the pre-college factors i can talk in more detail but they represent individual characteristics my cool choices in curriculum and so forth, post-secondary factors you can imagine, institutional resources among other things. we use a non-linear variance decomposition method where the differences in the probability of college completion were deposed to explain variation represented by the pre-college and post-secondary institutional characteristics and we explain approximately 94% of the model.

there are large differences between pre-college and post-secondary factors. we find pre-college characteristics contribute upwards of 61% of the total variants in explaining the college completion gap for both hispanic and black students as compared to their white student counterparts. that is more than half of the completion gap for underrepresented minority students is explained by pre-college characteristics. we sought to unpack what explains the gap among the pre-college characteristics. next slide. i won't spend too much time on this slide but what we see here is different factors, economic, am academic preparation compared to post-secondary factors. what we see here, the lesson is that for hispanic students, economic disadvantage seems to be driving the gap whereas with black and white students, academic factors is driving the gap in college completion by

race this signals different pre-college factors may be different. it signals the role of finances for latinos, and while finances matter for black students, academic preparation represents by far the greatest gap in resources with their white student counterparts. much of the work has included the role of minority serving institutions, and texas has a diverse landscape of hsi and hbcus. our previous work -- not yet. it's a surprise. our previous work looked at the graduation rates of hispanic compared to msis and non-msis. this painer is different. it compares black and hispanic graduation rates to white students. so we're going to see a different outcome. our result nrs question using the decomposition method indicate that there is a

negative contribution of the msi in our post-secondary factors explaining the gap in college completion. this is alarming, msis under rating systems are likely to show they are negatively contributing to the graduation when in fact many of these factors that influence the completion gap may have occurred well before enrollment. for this cohort we see 12.9% of the total variance explained by hsi status alone, 37% of the post-secondary context is influenced by status. the contribution is 9% or rather 28% of the post-secondary influences explained by hbc status. these 2002 numbers. previous cohorts actually show that hsis, the negative contribution has lessened. the analysis doesn't allow us to explore the detailed treatment of being an hsi or hsbu as that's difficult to capture in our di a set.

however a critical problem is ill lum nated when we compare graduation rates of black and hispanic students to that of white students with considerably more advantages, resources and choices in post-secondary institutions. not only texas but nationally. so what can we learn from these analyses if we are to move forward? show the msi slide. you already did, all right. what can we learn from these analyses if we're off to-to-move forward with a national college rating system? to be clear, our paper does not suggest we are against accountability or that there's no place for accountability in higher education. however we recommend there be much more clarity on the contributions to disadvantage systemic inequities and likely hoods of outcomes of educational circumstances that are not likely to change before the rating system is put in place. as such, we leave you with the following recommendations. again, college completion is not just a post-secondary story.

especially if you're an underrepresented minority student and failing to account for this result will penalize institutions in large numbers of minority students. finally, given the role of economic disadvantage and academic preparation in explaining the gap, policy interventions aimed at financial aid and developmental education are warranted. and really finally, the use of varietied and innovative day system to disentangle where completion is most challenged is highly recommended. what we mean by this is that incs has wonderful data sets that are use informal understanding gaps in racial achievement gaps in college completion gap but there's state databases that can also inform this question much better than our federal data sets. and so we recommend some form of partnership in which we get the best data to get the best research to form the best policy results that we can in this day and age.

thank you. >> thank you professor flores. now we'll turn mary beth gastman. >> good morning, everyone. thank you for coming and thanks to the sponsors and gary as well. so this paper was written by myself and two of my research assistants thai nguyen and andre castonoa. so what we try to do in our paper was provide a landscape of the nation's msis, institutions that educate 20% of our college students, often times people forget that. so these institutions as we know and most people have been say having a proven track record with first generation studentings, low income students and students of color. if you could flick the slide. so this will give you a few numbers that give you an idea of what's going on in the msi landscape. i want to point to the pell

grant percentage. 50% of students at msis are utilizing the pell grant, which is important msis are known for their family like environment, they're known for success in developmental education even though developmental education gets kicked around a bit. and they're also known for their same-race role model which is is empowering to student kofs or will. in n this era of accountability and outcomes based funding msis are vulnerable because of their financial situations as some of the presenters have explained and due to the risks they take. sara talked about this extensively as did other presenters. the risk they take in enrolling many students that other institutions don't enroll and these risks result in uneven outcomes. so we urge policymakers to

consider the unique contributions of msis in three critical areas i want to highlight. so one of the things that i noticed recently when i was reading the "my brother's reading the "my brother's keeper" report, issued by the obama administration, is that there was only one line in the entire report regarding msis. and they were pretty much left out of the into report. so what i want you to do is to just look for a minute in edge kati catin g-men of color. you can see the various groups that are enrolled full-time at msis. and then if you look at the part time enrollment, it's nearly another 50% with part time enrollment are are at msis. and then if you start to look at

the awarding of bachelor's degrees, you see that 20% of all the bachelor's degrees to men of color come from msis and 22% of all the associate's degrees to men of color. but they only ended up with one line in the "my brother's keeper" report. so we found that problem le matic. and we really want to point to the contributions that msis are making with men of color. next slide. another area that woe paid particular attention to is teacher education. another thing that we've been hearing, especially under the department of education is an emphasis on the need for increase in teachers, especially teachers of color. and how important that diversity is to young students of color. so one of the things that we've

noticed is the bulk of degrees are due to spanish speaking institutions. and that's important to point out. but we also want to point out the conferral of degrees by msis in the teacher integration area. we also, in the paper, talk about the fact that many of the teachers that are educated msis go back to the communities from which they came. so they go back to urban and rural communities and msis are collecting data on those communities. and those are communities that have high concentrations of students of color. next slide. another thing we talk about are the contributions of msis in the stem area. these are fairly well-known. we know -- i mean, there have

been countless papers, sylv sylvia vertado has done work in this area, as well, that show us many msis are doing a disproportionate job in the stem area. we don't know exactly what they do and my center is working on some projects related to that. but what we do in the paper is we point out these contributions that they are making in the area of stem. and what i want to stress here is, for us, these are three critical areas that are being talked about widely across the country. we hear a lot about the shortages of teachers. we hear much about the men of color and we also hear about our great needs in the area of stem. when they're thinking about how institutions are funded, to think about how msis contribute in these areas.

so e eve had a variety for policymakers. i'm just going to go over three. so for policymakers, one of the things that i think that we find most disturbing is the way they are left out of discussions and how they're not included in major national reports and discussions. even though there are many, many people in this room who try adamantly to get to these contributions of msis into these national discussions, so what we say is we don't think that these national reports not part of that discussion. we also recommend for msis that are not only larmger overreaching organizations, but institutions work together in coalitions across the various

msi sectors. and this can easily be done in states. it can also be done in a variety of other ways, institutions that have similar programs, similar curricular, similar financing. we urge msis to work together because in silos, their strength is really zapped. when you have 600 msis in the country and they're educating 20% of college and university students, we have a lot more strength. another thing we recommend is to focus on what works and what's successful. a long time ago, one of my professors, asa, who i'm sure you know, you know, we really know what works. and i think that one of the things that msis can show us is what works with low income

students of color and first generation students. we have many, many examples of what's successful. and i think we should look for msis how to be more successful and the way that we approach msis to see what we can do for them. i think we should look at msis and see what they can teach the rest of the nation. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> i first return to a response from deborah santiago, one oaf our partners. >> can everyone hear me? yeah, okay. well, thank everyone for the hard work in putting this together. i want to frame my responses to selisby, particularly, with one of a policy lands. i think what her paper and her colleagues have done is twofold. one, acknowledge what we in

public policy know. the train has left the building. we're not going to get away with saying we're different. we have a critical mass of students with critical needs so don't hold us acountable. none of us want that. so the second part of what i appreciate them putting together was how do we identify a fair assessment of the evaluation of these students who e that have a critical mass of those enrolled. and that becomes a challenge for us figuring out. how do we take the challenge and operationalize it where we prioritize simplicity over accuracy and we all have a certain measure of adhd in terms of what our priorities are in the moment. and if we can't put it in a bullet, if we can't make it concise, then it's a difficult thing to implement. and this's the kind of pragmatism we do when translating really good research into public policy. so i was thinking a lot about it.

and i wanted to push the research a little bit. >> did you say enact sound bytes? >> yes, i will. i have five minutes, now, right? yes. simplicity scale. what if we took the existing information and data that's being bantered about in d.c. and other places and tried to weight it by the issues that are raised that stella put together. we don't want two different forms of accountability. we have to approach it in a manner that doesn't let the institutions off the hook for students that have income needs and college readiness needs overall. so how do we ensure that tacreas

a fair system? what if we made sure that completion rates, not graduation rates, completion rates, add information on part time and transfer students. that's not included and why so many of these institutions have a high concentration of low income, needy students and aren't given the credit for trabs fers and part timers. there ways that we have to focus onto make sure that that happens. certainly, the economic disadvantages are a factor. and we weighted by the per cent students who are receiving pel or financial aid. we take a look at what kind of colleges are provided and wait

based on that. we look at the pir cent remediation. that doesn't mean only for these institutions, but i can assure you if we look at those factors, we are going to get a more balanced approach. perfect? no. that doesn't really exist in our world in education. but better. and i think we have -- we owe it to the students of these institutions that have taken on the challenge of educating those who are most need to make sure that they're getting the quality education that they deserve our citizenry overall. the others are all data that are collected. we do collect information on institutions of high and needy students. there's a way to include the financial o poechbt and i don't think we're thinking

significantly about that can address accountability. what we can't do is let the k-12 system off the hook. we can't let them off the hook and say well, because we have students that have additional need, that we lower expectations of the students or the institutions that enroll them. >> thank you very much. we'll turn now to my ucla colleague, sylvia cado. >> thank you. if you haven't read the paper, you should read it. if you do not know very much about the different institutions, it's a good, easy, fast, descriptive analysis on what minority serving institutions are. and, more importantly, the focus of diverse case in the work force and areas of national importance are a key in terms of really having all of that data in one place. it's a great paper in that regard. and i want to say, also, that they really focused on key,

national areas of importance. that teacher education, stem degrees, which we know for individuals, that's where the highest paid jobs are going to be in the future. and, also, that's what we already, nationally, have indicated is going to be a key area for enhancing american competitiveness. and then the issue of minority males. in all of those instances, the data in this paper show that if there were anything to impact either the financing of these institutions or the financing of their students, that we would see serious drops in terms of the representation of various minorities and middle income students and teacher education and stem and, of course, in the completion rates of minority males. i think the important pieces that she also brings under the paper are, of course, the

authorities serving minority institutions are still not entirely evident. and so sometimes are left out of the discussion. they can be severely impacted by any decisions that are made, nationally. one of the things that i think probably we need to talk more about is the research capacity of these institutions. i think both mary beth and myself and some of us on this panel have been looking at minority-serving institutions and trying to really tell the story. but i think, really, each institution has to help develop its own research capacity in the way earlier in the earlier session, dillard began to show how they were doing their own studies. our work has indicated that very often that they don't have the institutional research staff.

the data are very hard to gather and have a huge deficit in terms of being able to pull together the resources to not only report the data, but monitor and attract the students. this is very important because it points to a research issue. second, in terms of the accomplishments are evident even with fewer resources. these institutions are doing something with with the nation. i think i value for the first time i've seen the contributions of two years that are minority sugss serving in this paper. and i think you are doing that analysis. the third point, and it's sort of something that's obscured in the paper and i want you to talk a little bit more about, is diversity should be part of the metric. i think that's something deborah was beginning to say. how do you incorporate that into the metric.

one size fits all is not going to result. their resources are different. and, also, they are still making contributions. i want to kind of open it up. the notion of it has to be a consideration in all of this. >> thank you very much, sylvia. now, questions, there are three microphones up here at the front. go right ahead. >> good morning. thank you so much to the panelists. i'm from research ed consul tan sill. with the competing interests that e.d. has in regard to enrollment, needing to enroll a lot of international students, out-of-state students regarding

funding, how might the focus stay on closing the gaps at msis and hsis? >> so i think that's a very good question. the part that comprises the racial gap is not only what happens at the institution. so this doesn't preclude us from enrolling more students from other countries or more diverse students. but, again, i'm going to keep pushing that if we talked about the racial completion gap, it's not just what's occurring at the institution. so this idea that the high schools in particular.

this is not a conversation that should only stay here. >> yes. look. we make choices every day, right? institutions of higher ed are having to find means. and does that squeeze out the very time african americans are becoming the majority in the college population? i think so. i think the reality is that it doesn't have to be that way. we're making those choices because of expediency and facility. it's primary for us to consider who it is we're enrolling and why we're doing so. and why we're holding institutions acountable for a process for students we haven't edge kated in our system. the reality is if we're putting

privat privatecy. >> at our cam puss at ucla, we get less than 10% of our budget from the state of california. so this year, there's going to be 30% of students from outside our campus. but if we had a higher education act that gave recognition, it would give universities a different incentive if they were given additional recognition or funding as a result of those kinds of enrollment, rather than being punished for them by cutting their budget. >> my question is for mary beth.

the question that i have for you, when it comes to conversation about msis, you differentiate between hbcus and institutions. are they being left out when you're giving statistics about black students at hbcu? they should or should not be included? this is nor of a clarifying question. >> so, historically, black colleges and universities are different entities. that research typically is not

going to include pbis unless you include them. so, for our center, we do pay attention to pbis. but if our research is on hbcus, like, we have a big stem project that involves 10 hbcus. the one thing i would say there is that the outcomes in stem for pbis are are different than they are for hbcu ds. they're just two different pots. you know, leslie leads an organization that represents both. so i do think that pbis need attention because they are growing in similar ways to hsis. but they are two separate groups.

we want to do research related to both kinds of institutions. but i would say that pbis get a lot less attention. >> so it's a lot less research on pbis? >> a lot less research. there is hardly any research on pbis. >> thank you. >> april, are you out there looking for a dissertation? >> you know, one thing i would say is that they're very frustrated by that, too. i often have presidents of pbis saying why isn't anyone doing research related to our institutions? so it is a ripe area and they're looking for attention. >> hi. the national science foundation. i'm still formlating my question. but two things. first, i'm delighted that the work force issue came up, and my

question is for stella. we have this huge policy shift taking place in the k-12 era on schools and the number of dropouts is going to increase significantly and the number of those that prepare for college is really going to shift. i'm wondering in terms of the pre-college piece, what can we do to -- we know some of those issues in terms of identifying youngsters who are going to be struggling getting into college and i'm wondering what we can do

in terms of the data set that we need should not start in college but way beforehand, if that makes sense. i think you bring up some very good points. we actually use this data to look at the success of the college access success and we found very important. and that relates to the timing in the l.l. program. we found that students who participate in the program for three years are likely to do better than latino students. it does not hinder their college access rates. but, more than that, leads them

down a different path. and the biggest point of moeblt here for those students and this translates for our other groups, is access to the rigorous course work in high school. we do know that rigger malters. and elu students are more likely not to have access to those students. so as we look forward, we've got to reframe ell as not just learning english, but sbransz for rigorous course work for college access. >> in the paper, there is a clear reference to looking at k-20 data bases.

so i think that reenforcing your point. we have students participating in free and reduced lunch. that's sort of the basic proxy. we don't see any variance on the things that the paper and others raised are. we don't see great changes in economic mobility. that's often where we look at financial aid and say you can apply and have a year waiting out. so the challenge becomes how do we create public policy that intervenes, given the data that we currently have. i think the data are there. we're not using them. and making sure that the k-12 that we're waiting appropriately for the reality of these populations.

let me end quick with the preparation gap that was still not as big as i thought it was going to be. the biggest gap of concern in academic preparation and this is going to translate to however that's at. there's something where students might be getting more access to black stooudents to rigorous course work. >> thank you very much. very quick question. i'm just going to take a second at the end to say some of this panel relates to other work that we're doing. let me take a quick question. >> yes, thank you so much. i have a quick question for ms. santiago. in terms of assessment. and i understand your point about not making a double

standard, having two different assessmenteds and looking more towards weighting different factors. how would you factor and weight the preparation of k-12 remediation issues. if i can sneak in one last question to ms. glassman, the impact to minority serving institutions of women of color as well as men of color. >> sure. thank you. >> i'll try to get there fast. so things that i identified. we do a lot of ncs data already to weight the data that are out there. i'm not going to get into the complicated part of that. we do have elements and what percent of students are taking remediation? we know that. that's at the college level for academic preparation at the k-12 level.

we can do that. that's something i would definitely weight. that needs to be waeighted when you're looking at completion. for me, completion is the role enrollment is necessary component. looking at the profile of the students who are enrolling is going to be weighted by the kons trated mass of students who have need whether it's financial or academic. >> great. so, in this paper, we did focus on men of color because we tried to focus on three critical areas that the nation is calling only right now. in a previous paper that i wrote with value valerie, we wrote a

paper specifically at black colleges. i vice president looked at that across all msis. the success of black colleges is due to women of color. i mean to black women. the success is much higher with regard to black women. and it's especially high in the area of stem. i haven't looked akrsz all msi ds. it's a really good question. black males, disproportionately, overwhelmingly choose to go to an hbcu over black females.

they overwhelmingly choose an hbcu. >> i just wanted to take a minute at the end so we can thank the panel to clent on a lot of real vant studies that relate to pre-college preparation. we've shown in a recent study that latinos are now in 86% non-white schools and poverty. african americans are in similar situations, but mostly minorities with latinos. these schools have much less availability of qualified teachers with experience, especially in mathematics and science.

they are similar in enrollment of many cases. these are unequal if we take those stuntss into colleges if they're willing to take a chance on them and then punish the colleges for taking aim at them. and i know it's hard in an environment of sound bytes to do that. but it's essential that we keep those things in our mind. so, now, after these two intense panels, let me thank this panel very much for a very illuminating discussion. luding

how perspective students are evaluated by the admissions process. this is an hour and ten minutes. >> okay. well, i hope you're all refreshed and >> okay, well, i hope you're all refreshed and ready for an intense final panel here. we're going to have three speakers on this panel. so why don't we start at the end. and we'll put anne up first.

>> thank you for the opportunity to be here. my particular paper is co-authored with wilbur rodriguez who could not be here today. we focused on how the shortcomings of a post-secondary rating system could lead to shortchanging hispanic-serving institutions and their out commonwealth of pennsylvanias. o. so as today's research and other research indicates there are well documented differences in student and institutional characteristics between hsis and nonhsis that would lead hsis to have lower graduation rates on average than nonhsis. and so our analysis at the beginning of this paper -- in the previous session we talked about the possibility of adjusting for some of these student and institutional characteristics. and so in fact at the beginning of our paper, we find that when we account for student characteristics, financial resources of institutions,

policies at institutions that might influence completion, whether or not an institution has an open admissions policy, that the gaps in graduation rates, since that's the most commonly used measure being discussed right now to measure institutional performance six-year graduation rates, that the gap in graduation rates between hispanic-serving institutions and non-hispan non-hispanic-serving institutions disappears. this is consistent with what stella was talking about in the last session. so another topic that came up was the idea of a possibility of adjusting for these differences. so if we were to calculate a ratings system with the data that we have available in data sets like the integrated post secondary education system or ipeds, that's really the only

data system that's national that has data on all of the post secondary institutions in the u.s. we'll talk in a minute about how there's problems with missing data, but it has the most comprehensive data. so what some have talked about is using the method of regression adjustment to level the playing field in terms of assessing institutional performance of minority-serving institutions and non-minority-serving institutions. >> is it something like what deborah santiago was talking about? >> exactly what deborah santiago was talking about. and so in regression adjustment, the idea is to predict a graduation rate based on what we would expect given the student and institutional, financial characteristics, perhaps policies to promote college completion, admissions policies, and compare it with the actual graduation rate. and so if the expected graduation rate was higher than the actual graduation rate of an

institution, that institution might be seen as underperforming, but if the graduation rate that was expected was below what we saw to be the actual graduate of that institution, it might be interpreted as overperforming. one of the takeaways that's sort of been coming up is that msis and hsis are doing more with less. a lot of them may not be underperforming as they appear when we only look at outcomes as graduation rates but when we take into account these other factor, they may actually be doing better than we think. next slide. okay. so we went ahead and once we sort of established that the gaps disappeared, we then went ahead and examined different ways of looking at regression adjustment. so one of the problems we

initially came across with this data set ipeds is that we can only adjust for characteristics on which there are available data, so that regression adjustments may be especially useful for looking at groups, large samples of institutions and comparing them with one another like stella flores did her analysis, but they may be a little less useful in terms of looking at the performance of individual institutions when we break it out. ipeds has a lot of missing data, especially for hsis and this is also the case of minority-serving institutions in general. there are a lot of reasons for that and we talk about that in the paper. we also have statistics on it, but it's a significant amount of missing data. but perhaps one of the most important things we heard in the last session is that academic preparation, the course work that students take, how they perform in that course work in high school and stella flores

uses math as an indicator which is often used as an indicator, that's that the most important predictor of college completion for students. and that data are not available -- those data are not available in ipeds. and so as stella flores was talking about college completion is not a college issue but we can't, with the current data available in ipeds, we can't necessarily take into account that as completely as we might like to yet. go ahead. so one of the things that we did in this paper was we took -- we ran two adjustments where we -- in one of them we look at student characteristics, educational characteristics, financial context characteristics and we took what we could best get at in terms of

precollege which was whether or not an institution had an open admissions policy. that may not sound like precollege but that was the closest we could get to and the most available data for hsis. then we also -- there's also a common measure of looking at student characteristics of incoming admissions test scores, so incoming nact and s.a.t. scores. we ran two, one including the open adjustments policy and the test scores policy. what we found was whether a college seems under or over performing begins on the variables that are included in the model fp in our analysis nearly 30% of the institutions changed direction between when we included the admissions policy variable and when we included the test scores variable. and so the fact that the -- that

this calculation can change this much should raise red flags for the tying of financial aid to these results. we know that in 2015 the performance institutional ratings system is proposed and so we are trying to look at data shr issues, but if we go a step further and think about tying funding decisions to these ratings, that should really raise a red flag. next slide. and so this bring us to our recommendations. the first one is to collect more data known to be predictive of institutional performance. and so what came up in our last session was the importance of academic preparation and characteristics. so that's one example. another example that was raised is being able to track students from institution to institution, and so right now the graduation rate measure used in ipeds is

only students who begin at that institution and finish that institution and are full-time students. so -- and students who finish in six years. and so when we consider that a lot of the students we've been talking about, they may take longer to finish, they may not be full-time students and latino students in particular are more likely to transfer. those student are being left out of these conversations. so if it's possible to collect more data, i think one of the things that sylvia hurtado is going to talk about, too, is not only it is collecting data about the inputs and also marybeth gasman, but rethinking what it is these institutions contribute. what other measures are indicators of institutional performance might there be that these minority-serving institutions and hsis are contributing? but the second recommendation is

that we don't want to make this an unfunded mandate. a lot of these institutions don't have resources for data collection and reporting comparable measures, so providing capacity to do that would be a really good idea. i think part of this could also involve partnering with the national student data clearinghouse as deborah santiago mentioned, to be able to track students. that would be a good opportunity to track transfer students, for example, nationally, students who move institutions. resisting the temptation to implement high stakes poll sis based on inaccurate data and assessment is really key as well and an important takeaway from our analysis. finally, there are several higher education associations right now who are making efforts to find accountability metrics and to find reasonable ways of reporting them. and some of them involve bringing in measures like

transfer students. so to build on what those institutions are already doing and involve them as partners and not reinvent the wheel, the work that's already being done with state longitudinal data systems at the national clearinghouse with these systems and higher ed leaders who are already trying to account better for institutional performance. thank you. >> thank you very much, professor nunez. and we're going to turn now to nicholas hillman, but before we do that, deputy studley is here and we want to make space for her at the table. if you could just move down and grab another chair. >> there's a chair right here. >> okay. so i would turn to nicholas hillman for the next paper presentation. >> great. thank you for the opportunity to share my work here. a work in progress for sure.

so i'd love to have conversations and ideas about where this could go next, but the central argument here for this paper, which is called the differential impacts of college ratings case of educational deserts. the central argument here is a very straightforward one, a simple one that gets overlooked but one that's critically important for thinging about the educations of a federal ratings system and especially tying funds to a college ratings and that's place matters. so often in research and policymaking on college access, we focus on the process of opportunity. questions like did the student take ap courses, did the student apply for the fafsa, did they take the right steps in order to be prepared and enroll and persist in college? and procedural opportunity is obviously important. but there's also geographic opportunity and the geography of opportunity is something that

matters here, and that's what's going to be explored in this paper. it draws on what we might be familiar with, this idea of food deserts which is part of a family of research which is on communities built environments. we have research in social sciences that show low incomes racially segregated and high poverty communities across the country happen to have built-in environments where, for example, they have limited access to public parks, they have high density to industries that pollute, they've got all these characteristics that define the community including access to healthy affordable nutritious food in food deserts is what we might be familiar with, but we should think of community college as part of the built-in environment of our communities and on top of this moving away from the process of opportunity to the geography of opportunity will help us think about how people make choices about where to go to college simply based on their built environment. not everybody has the luxury to

shop around for college, to search across the country or even across the state for places to go to school. and so there are places around the country that we'll explore in just a second and this paper dives into a little bit and i think we're only scratching the surface but there are places around the country where these opportunities are mostly constrained highly constrained and not surprisingly cut along the lines of race and class. so if we hop to the next slide, we can see -- hopefully, we can see a map of the united states and this is broken up into all of the counties, 3,147 counties. sorry anybody from alaska or hawaii, not included in this map. but this gives us a mental image about spatial factors that could matter in choosing a college. so what i did in this study took all the counties, clustered them around what are called commuting

zones. this is not something i made up. this is something people have been using for years to try to find the commuting patterns of counties. this means in memphis, tennessee, for example, people cross state lines, that would be captured in a commuting zone, which is a cluster of counties that kind of share common economies, share common commuting patterns for labor. so makes sense to me that people would also be more or less willing to also commute to school if they live in a common commuting zone. so what this paper does is it shrinks these 3,000 counties down into 700 commuting zones. commuting zones are the unit of analysis here. within each commuting zone i wanted to see how many public colleges are even available? are there commuting zones that have zero, are there xho muting zones that only have one. why public college? because that's where most students enroll, it's their mission to serve the communities. on the next slide this should

appear, if we just take this four-county cluster in southwest texas, eagle pass, anybody from the area, i'd love to talk to you more and hear your thoughts. dr. nunez has more comments prepared. this student is represented by a large hispanic population, a community with high unemployment rates and low educational attainment rates. and this community set of four counties has about 100,000 people who live there. on the next slide you can see that a student who wanted to shop around for college in the eagle pass commuting zone, if they follow the logic you have our federal policymakers they would go to college navigator, put in their zip code, do a search for what kind of colleges are nearby, and this is what they would find. you can't see it, sorry.

they would find, you enare the your zip code on the left and you can say within 100 miles of my zip code, how many schools are there. there are four schools. the first two are two for-profit colleges, the same institutions, the third one is southwest texas junior college, the fourth one is also for-profit college. so a student who lives in this community is probably going to be place bound and if they're looking for colleges, have one of two options, go to the public community college or go to this for-profit school. so we have to really think about how people make choices in these communities. if we advance to the next slide, this takes a squik snipt of some of the details that might be interesting to us in terms of the differences in these two different institutions. apologize for turning around. but we can see the middle group is the community college, its largest program is general studies, has about 5 hss this student most underrepresented

minorities also high proportion receiving pell lower net price than the other school, the for-profit college that serves a tiny handful of students a few dozen mostly in cosmetology. if you're not interested in cosmetology and you live there, you really don't have any choices of where to attend. here's the tricky part. and there are several. and this actually opens up a whole slippery slope about our ratings system. one of the criteria that would probably be included in a federal ratings system is the cohort default rate the percentage of students who borrow in a school and default on their loan within three years of repayment. 30%, if you hit 30%, you're going to be on notice, if you do that for three years you lose access. that's a current policy. this community ledcollege is at% already. if that's included in a ratings system this college has a pretty high risk of being rated poorly. we can play this logic out pretending that aid is

eventually tied to a colleges rating that would probably mean that this college would lose access to aid or have it constrained in some way or another. a student, one of the 5 hss this students who are attending this institution, if they're trying to find a better place to go, where are they going to go? and on the next slide we can see this is not just a problem in southwest texas. and you advance one more slide. it's across the country. there are commuting zones that shas a similar environment to that i just described. in the paper i use this data set -- i'd be happy to share and explore other questions you may be interested with this data, but i've run a regression just to get a simple count of each institutions in the commuting zone according to the commuting zone's economic profile, unemployment rates and several other characteristics that might matter and be interesting to be able to find some patterns in what these institutions -- i'm sorry what these communities are like.

ideally there would be no patterns. this would be completely random. and it's not at all. these commuting zones are drawing a line the lines of race and class just like built-in environment inequalities are drawing the lines between race and class in other ways. so one in ten people in the u.s. live in one of these commuting zones, about one in five colleges, public colleges, i'm sorry, are located in serving these communities, and these communities tend to have growing hispanic populations. they tend to have what i'm assuming is going to be intergenerational poverty, intergenerational inequality because they have low attainment levels already. when we thing about policy context and the college navigator example started helping us to think about the implications, we think about the implications here, is it an unintended consequence if that's

educational deserts because it could have a deficit connotation to it but we've got to call it something and realize that the built environment is different and the opportunities differ depending on where you live. if a policy is going to accidentally affect colleges that are serving these communities it's disproportionately affecting communities and communities that are working class and have already low levels of educational attainment. so we have to think about the roll of place and that place matters and that the current discussion around college ratings is so focused on consumer information that it's dominated by people who maybe don't have a lot of experience living in these communities or having institutions represented in their frameworks. and so what we ought to think about is the role of place and

geography in maybe even giving colleges waivers if they're serving in these communities oar at least identifying which ones they are. thanks. >> thank you very much. professor hillman. we're going to turn for our last presenter of the morning to sylvia hurtado. >> thanks for having me here today to talk about some ongoing research at the higher education research institute. for some of you who have been talking about weighted kinds of measures about looking at graduation completion, we've been doing this for institutions who participate in our national surveys for almost 20 years. we've been working with campuses to create student input adjusted graduation rates providing them equations and more recently calculators so they can understand how they're doing relative to the kinds of students they're recruiting. the other thing that we've been doing is really using now more all of the national databases to really look at what we call efficiency scores. so i'm going to talk about work

related to those two areas. let me just start with the work we've been doing on metrics for understanding graduation rates and degree completion particularly in s.t.e.m. fields. both of these shs are vital to the economy and serving institutions are vital to the economic revitalization of diverse communities. i think nicholas' work is actually beginning to say where you have a college is very important but where they're located is also very important in terms of the communities they serve. the second thing i want to say is any national ratings system must be fair to students and fair to institutions that serve first generation and underrepresented groups. by underrepresented i mean african-american, latino, native american and asian american groups. what we know for those particular groups of students, those targets low income first generation underrepresented, they are less likely to graduate from any college that is they are more likely to graduate from some colleges, they're more

expectative obviously taking only those they know will succeed. but when we control for a whole range of factors we know those students are still less likely to graduate. let me get to the metrics and before i move to the first slid. i'm just showing results. the raw graduation rates are not as effective in really identifying the real challenges of educating large targets of these populations that's stand the most to gan from college. our work is to identify what we call engines of social mobility to help them understand where they are and relative to peers and also how they might move forward in terms of improving their degree completion. but what we know, we know that we need metrics that take into account the types of students institutions recruit and the resources available. so one of our metrics.

i'll start with student inputted adjustment measures using our freshman survey. one year we started, about 700 institutions that's used this data. combine that with the national clearing house data. so we're able to then produce predictors are graduation. and that institution, for every institution we're able to give them a score in terms of actual versus predicted. one of the projects we've just recently completed is really looking at those institutions at the highest performers in terms of student adjusted input measure. what we found of 356 institutions we had all that data on, about 108 were doing better than expected on all three groups. low income, first generation and underrepresented groups. of course, they varied in terms of resources. the first metric does not take into account resources. the actual versus expected on

the first slide, danny, i have basically three institutions that are 10 to 20 points higher doing higher than expected in terms of actually completing students. now we put a 50% line graduation rate kind of at the center so you'll see some institutions are below 50% but doing 10% to 11% points higher in terms of completion. there some are institutions that are expected to be below 50% but are doing above 50%. and some institutions, the top one is a public university that actually is started above 50% and they actually increase that rate. so in a way we're looking at some talent development that's happening with these institutions. so let me -- let's go to the next slide. all right. so we took of the 356 institutions, 108, we tried to predict what was the

characteristics of those institutions that were doing better than expected. and so the key predictors are those that you see on the slide. those institutions with -- that actually had lower selectivity, those institutions with -- that actually had lower selectivity,d the amount of financial aid for first time students and also the instruction expenditures per capita. in some ways that's as it should be. students should be well supported. and also your instructional stun expenditures if you have more is low-income first generation, underrepresented groups you need to direct your resources toward those types of students.sy so that's sort of one way to look at it.af another way to look at it is we use the time ratings. if you've gone online, time has a rating system, a ranking system based on graduation, affordability and accessibility then they have a holistic rank e that combines all three.s.

so we use the time ratings. if you go to the next slide. our to compare our institutional performance indices. and, really, what you see is for the 16 campuses that we ha identified that were actually had an -- had an expected rate that was, well, let's -- they had an actual rate that was 10 to 20 points higher for low ent, income first generation and underrepresented students, that they -- a lot of them do rank higher an the time graduation rank but those with the higher proportion of minority students will be ranking lower. so we know that msis, even though they're doing better than expected, 10 to 20 points higher than what they're expected given their student body, they're y ko going to be -- next any kind of school rating system. the next slide is really using

the time holistic rank which is by using access graduation and also affordability. - you see then that there's no sem relationship between our and as performance index using -- for underrepresented minority itutio students and also this ranking system.nsery but there are a new institutions that are very high on both, ours and also holistic rank. for the most part, others are going to be ranked lower. the other thing that you find ie those at the top 16, they rank t lower on these and graduation because they're probably less affordable and less accessible. that is to the top 16 that are g doing well.s they might have small numbers of low income, first generation students. okay. the next one -- the next one really looks at our s.t.e.m. ay. efficiency. it's focused an first time, full-time freshman. we used the data including transfers using five years of ipeds data to understand efur

completion we used what's called frontier c modeling which compares us similarly situated institutions based on resources. faculty labor, student nd enrollment and expenditures per student. in a way, this is another way of identifying top performers.r one of the things we found and that's a much longer paper and much more papers you can access online is that for the most we part, private institutions comer out looking better on most kindn of rankings. what we find, the public the institutions are more efficient we compare the s.t.e.m. completion rate with efficiencye scores. we find that minority serving f students are more efficient at producing s.t.e.m. degrees for blacks and latino students respectively.

the other thing is because these particular efficiency scores have not controlled input, that's different kind of in measure, is more selective stito institutions do better than expected. well, in terms of efficiency.ake but what we've done is really as then broken down the selectivity so you can take into account access to find actually the most efficient kinds of institutions. what we're doing next is trying to visit these institutions. it should focus on the degree to completion of minorities as well as institutional resources. they help to identify top performers and social mobility and i'm hoping that a ranking oe ratings system nationally would actually be actually used for that. neces not necessarily to basically

limit financial aid.limi they are really serving as engines of social mobility. even though their rates may not look that hot, we're able to see what they are able to do with their students is amazing. one of the questions that came e up earlier, what do we do?g. how do we handle the input? we how do we handle some of these things? these are only four year institutions we looked at. two-year institutions are really doing the bulk of this work. that's additional areas to look at.>> t >> thank you very much.ha i'm going to turn to lorelle espinoza representing a.c.e. >> let's play musical chairs for a minute here.

thank you, gary. and on behalf of a.c.e. center for policy research and strategy, i do want to thank the authors, the other respondents t and those in attendance today dg for contributing to this my important dialogue. turning to the paper by my i colleague behind me and her co-author, i applaud you for ves taking the lead on attempting t do what many have said would be a good approach to the t president's ratings plan which is to rate institutions based ow estimates of how they should be performing compared with how they actually are performing.thi as you'll see when you read the paper and i hope everyone can le while a perfectly reasonable approach in theory as your bear analyses bear out, the approach is flawed and sheds light an how other analyses that may attemptt to do will run into the same o l danger. and that is the data collected i by the department of education, particularly the ipeds data used in the paper is wholly inadequate for the purposes of rating institutions.

now beyond the missing data that you cite as problematic, and its is, and beyond the instability of the regression adjustments, given a limited number of data d points that fail to capture tht complex environments as is borne out in the paper, there's realle another underlying data reality which is not new.eality i know for many people in the room but it's something that is worth addressing here. and that is that the ipeds data and if that is used to rate hispanic serving institutions io particular and other minority pa serving institutions, it's really not reflective of the students that attend those institutions. now we at a.c.e. have done some looking at the national post nd secondary student aid study which is another data source out of the department that's very robust.s nationally representative but ie not a census data as is ipeds. and we see to illustrate my point that 49% of latinos are af

enrolled part time.these that's half of latino students.e these students are not going to be represented in the outcome measures in ipeds since ipeds does not currently track outcome measures for part-time studentsf 65% delay post secondary enrollment. that's another group that won't' be recognized. so this further means that meat institutions that serve these students well will go unrecognized. now building on the first and ue second recommendations in the paper, i want to caution against the need to collect more data.e what we need, and i'm certain that the authors would agree isa to collect accurate data. and, yes, this absolutely col includes a better accounting of academic preparation given its relationship to retention and to completion.academic so the arguments in the paper, s in fact, raise another issue, which is central for fact, consideration. and that is how the department n

and other agencies, and this wa referenced by a speaker earlier, can actually empower and incentivize institutions. only and i know to not only report he out data but to actually utilize their own data to improve ageni student outcomes. so this means in addition to ths department needing to rethink tj its census data, the departmente and other agencies actually havd within their powers the to on assist institutions and doing ah better job of utilizing date tor identify performance and resource gaps and to ns the meaningfully act on that information through institutional policy and wa practice.i and this really means allowing institutions the capacity as was mentioned to have more institutional research efforts within their very own walls. par i just wanted to say a couple er more things. i applaud nick's paper for

addressing environment. we have some work coming up at the center for policy research and strategy to look at how qu state context really influences institutions and regional context as well.te and i just want to say quickly, we know that institutions of thf same sector can reveal vastly different characteristics, depending an the strength of the k-12 system that surround those institutions. the make-up of their community. the students they are serving, the policies around transfer, around undocumented student access to higher education and i really want to applaud a point d made earlier.t i think it was to look at state data and for the federal government to in fact, partner t with states and to incent stated to use their data to allow for c accountability measures. a final point, i'm almost out of time, i want to let people known that we have a paper that came out earlier this year that looks at the college choice behavior of low-income students.